Hell in a Handbasket: After Fall, Winter Edition

This one just plain hurts to do, but it has to be done. You’ve got to rip the bandage off at some point, no matter how bad it’s going to hurt. And trust me, this one does indeed hurt.

I went into writer/director/lead actor Eric Schaeffer’s After Fall, Winter with an open mind. From the beginning, I liked it. A lot. It told the tale of Michael (Schaeffer), a writer in self-imposed exile in Paris that can’t sell his latest novel; after initial success in his career, he’s broke and living off of maxed-out credit cards while feeding an S&M habit. Enter Sophie (Lizzie Brochere), a hospice worker who also happens to moonlight as a dominatrix. The two meet independently and form a genuine attachment to each other while still trying keep up their wounded guard. Can these two crazy kids overcome their inner demonsa and make it work?

So good, except for THE LAST FIVE MINUTES.

Before I get into my rant, I want to take a minute and praise the film for what it got right. It had a realistic-looking cast, which is rare in the era of radioactive Chicklet teeth and washboard abs (for the record, real always wins over plastic. Yay dad bod and mom bod. I’ll happily eat ice cream with you over kale.). It tackled a parent with a brain disorder without going for extreme melodrama. We saw a Romany girl get a totally raw deal with terminal illness and a family that sucked. Hell, we saw a kid that died of cancer in a fashion that was both honest and respectful. We got to see that the life of a writer can sometimes be wrought with financial insecurity and professional disdain. It gave us a hero that wasn’t always honest, and a heroine that could be an unlikable person at times. In a world that likes its women to be apple-pie sweet all the time, this was refreshing: Brochere’s Sophie could be downright nasty at times, which made her far more like someone you would know as opposed to a pristine angel that redeems her male counterpart through the virtue of her love. It also made sure that we got to see a sex worker in a more positive light: a woman that liked her job, that was good at what she did, and didn’t have a pimp holding a gun to her head. We simply don’t get to see this type of positivity – we often only see a victim, someone that needs to be rescued – as opposed to someone who enjoys consensually sodomizing someone with a broomhandle. Bravo for breaking those barriers, Schaeffer. I sincerely mean that.

Finally, something that feels real.

By all means, After Fall, Winter should have had me, and it did… up until the end. In a climatic moment, we see Michael ask a notoriously rough prostitute to kill him after he and Sophie have broken up; after checking him – including pulling a bag off of his head after minutes without oxygen and notf finding a discernable pulse – Sophie decides that she’s over her own no-love policy and decides to kill herself so that she can join him, giving the character a chance to prove her devotion to someone she thought she was incapable of loving. And she succeeds.This is where it should have ended, but no. The last five minutes of this film completed messed up everything positive it had going for it, so much to the point that I am still angry at it as a whole. In a completely unrealistic turn, Michael comes to… with Sophie’s dead body swaying from the rafters of the warehouse they’re in. There is no magical resurrection for her. Sophie is dead, and the film ends with Michael crying over the loss. At this point, I yelled an exasperated, “Are you fucking kidding me?” at my television. I was angry. I waited until the end of the credits. Nothing. This is the ending Schaeffer gave us.

I looked a bit like this too.

I’m pissed for several reasons. First off, a hospice nurse knows when someone is dead. They don’t yell, “Oopsies!” and shrug when their non-dead patient springs back to life moments after the death has been declared. Second, Michael had been without oxygen and had sustained a nasty beating; the chances of him surviving without medical intervention are slim to none. Third, Sophie’s suicide felt far too dramatic for her character, especially considering how balanced she was in comparison to the melodramatic Michael throughout the bulk of the film. The switch of their personalities, no matter how much Sophie had grown, felt abrupt and out-of-character to the point of being inconsistent rather than a fluid transition. The worst part of this, though, was the fact this ending managed to marr what was otherwise a good story that was well-executed. How else could this one have ended? I have a few ideas:

Sophie saved Michael. They go on to take care of her ailing mother. He writes a great book about a dominatrix. They pay off his debts and live happily in the French countryside. The end.

Michael dies. Sophie goes on to form a relationship with someone that she manages to not insult at every turn. She is grateful yet misses him. The end.

They both die, signifying that they were able to commit to one another. Sad but at least they’ret together. The end.

It’s just a pitch for a book. An editor says he loves it. Michael and Sophie were just characters, and the real writer is someone we’ve never seen. Perferrably not E.L. James. The end.

The whole thing was a dream had by Victoria Principal. Patrick Duffy is actually in the shower. All is
well. The end.

Godzilla shows up and steps on the warehouse, killing everyone beyond a shadow of a doubt. Goes on to destroy half of Europe. Has an epic battle against Mothra. Both are destroyed by nuclear missiles. The end.

ANYTHING would have been better than the cheap ending this was given. The only thing that would have made it worse would have been if Sophie and Michael’s secret love child discovered her tragic origins years later. If you do the math, that would have made her a good seven months premature, but hell, by the logic of Michael’s survival, it would have been doable.

The only thing worse than a bad movie is a good movie that manages to completely mess up everything it had going for it. I’m disappointed in you, After Fall, Winter. You had potential. You gave us a real story, something that explored people as people, something that made us view sex workers as people, something that wasn’t the usual romantic comedy that we so often get stuck with. You took all that and you completely messed it up. You broke my heart, kid. You broke my heart.